Anniversaries

I've just been watching the weather forecast before I came upstairs - I think I'm glad I live here! All these burning temperatures aren't fun if you have to do things - not just paid work, but all the huvtaes of a normal day, with cooking and cleaning (or even washing up!) and no air-conditioning and no-one dancing attendance on you. Indeed, I was positively chilly in church despite a wee fleece jacket, though I warmed up (as did the building) when the sun appeared midway through the service. 

It was a lovely service, though quite sparsely attended with the start of the season when people go off on holidays and before most visitors, such as they are, arrive. Paddy's sermon had us all giggle at the thought that St Peter and St Paul, who seemed to argue quite bit in the New Testament, are forever linked in the church Kalendar like some sort of eternal punishment for disagreeing ... and the final hymn really got to me, and Himself's closing voluntary which he improvised - it was all good. And afterwards I had good conversations with a different group of people from my normal chit-chat, and that was good too. In fact, we were so late leaving the church that I was desperate with an addict's intensity to get to my coffee - a treat which I defer because if I drink the less vibrant coffee in church it takes the edge off my need! (I know - I'm crazy)

Di came to join us as usual, and lunch was late. I decided I really had to cut back some plants that were interfering with our path at the back - not to mention the wisteria, whose long triffid-like tendrils bash at our window like whips in the wind. I went along the lane to consult my friends who have a thirty-year old wisteria (mine is pretty young) and ended up sitting in the sun for a chat and a laugh with my oldest Dunoon friend, followed by a hing (Old Glaswegian term) with another friend across the lane who was getting on with his gardening while I was blethering. 

Eventually Himself came looking for me (he'd been tidying in the loft) and I returned to get on with the pruning. This extraordinary moth was sitting on the shed door when I went to get out the long-handled loppers - it looked as if it was made of lace. I've not actually seen this variety before, though I have seen photos ...

And finally, I realised that this weekend marks 20 years since I retired from teaching. I remember walking down the playground to my car, with a bundle of books in my arms and a cake perched on top, while a pupil from my S3 boys walked in front of me ceremonially carrying the lab stool on which I had perched for all the years I had been in that particular classroom, he and his friends having decided no-one else should ever sit on it after me. It is beside me now in the study, acting as a table at the moment but sometimes pressed into use at the keyboard for a gig. I was reminded of the anniversary because of the programmes on the telly about the London Tube bombings, which took place when we were on holiday in a signal-free cottage on the Crinan Canal and which had me standing on the very edge of the canal with my phone, trying to find out why my journalist son wasn't at his own desk at the Guardian and nearly falling into the water in my anxiety ...

But that's another story.